The Gun-Runner: A Novel/Chapter 30
CHAPTER XXX
THE LAST DITCH
McKinnon's ears were ringing, and his head still swam a little, as he climbed into the track-motor's driving-seat. He noticed, too, as they gathered speed, that he was wet with sweat, and that the cool mountain air was sending a chill into his very bones.
"Look! It's daylight coming!" cried the girl at his side. He peered out through the phantasmal grayness that lightened about them, and a new anxiety crept and corroded through all his aching body. There would be no appreciable period of friendly twilight. The tropics, he knew, would explode the full light of day on them like a rocket. And between him and safety still lay seven miles of track.
"It will have to be full speed now—to the end," he told the girl.
She called back, "Yes—I know," as the lever went to the last notch and the car racked and pounded along the uneven rails. The forest fell away, and they came into a more broken country, winding and twisting between bald and rocky hills, past coffee-farms from which early awakened dogs barked out at them. But the ragged-hooded car raced and pounded forward, taking the sharp curves with a scream of protest, striking with malignant heels at every passing switch-point. Then the light grew stronger; they could see a more orderly and level country studded with rancho and hacienda, and a crooked, sun-baked road, white with dust, and broken walls, and clumps of stunted trees.
Then the girl gave a cry and caught at his arm.
"Guariqui!" she said, pointing toward the northwest. He had no time to look, for at the same moment his own eyes had caught sight of something which filled him with an even more compelling emotion.
Before the rocky hill-crests toward which they were sweeping, he caught sight of a row of smoke columns and the serried white splashes of tent walls against the yellow-gray of the parched fields. He leaped to his feet as he saw it. He surrendered the lever recklessly, and turned and struggled with one of the cartridge-boxes on the row behind them. He pulled and tugged and worked it quickly forward, to heighten the barricade on the right-hand side of the car, for he knew they were charging down on De Brigard's camp. He realised that their climacteric moment was at hand, that the time for their last dash across the enemy's lines had come.
Already he could see the pacing sentries as they met and countermarched between the scattered splashes of white. He could see the corraled horses and mules of De Brigard's cavalry feeding together. As the car raced on, he could even make out groups of men in ragged uniform, barefooted, squatting about the camp-fires.
Some of them he could see stooping quietly over black pots; one group was splashing and washing at a long wooden water-trough. There seemed something tranquil in the scene, something strangely unlike the way of war in the slowly rising smoke columns, in the slowly moving barefooted men, in the ranchos of palm and tree-boughs, in the water-trough and the tranquilly feeding horses and mules.
Then the scene changed, with the quickness of a stage-picture. The cue for that change came with a challenge from a sentry and then a single rifle-shot from a second sentry on guard further along the track-edge. The camp changed with that shot.
It seemed to McKinnon like the sudden change that swept through his coherer-dust when vitalised with its magnetic current. The sentry, in the meantime, repeated the shot, three times, until the man in the charging car stood up and returned his fire, sharply, driving him to cover.
But the alarm had been given. The tree-clumps and the broken stone walls seemed to swarm with men; the white tents became strangely like hornets' nests disgorging excited occupants. The barefooted idlers grouped about the camp-fires no longer watched the pots and splashed about the water-trough. They became armed irregular infantry; they were suddenly transformed into a vindictive and resolute-minded company whose one purpose in life was to pour lead into a huge, rusted, bullet-riddled track-motor that had ridden down their sentries and broken into their very lines.
For one incongruous moment McKinnon had felt vaguely sorry for those lean and hungry-looking and unkempt idlers in dirty denim uniforms. He had thought of them as homeless and unhappy men who were being made the tools of forces which they could not comprehend. Now they seemed to him dancing and running brown-faced fiends, doing their best to put a bullet through the head of a stranger who was very tired and hungry, and a little tipsy, perhaps, from immoderate drafts of brandy on a wofully empty stomach.
He saw them, as in a dream, but he scarcely gave them a thought. All he knew was that the woman huddled down at his side was still safe, and his car was still under way. Beyond that, he knew, nothing counted. Death had snapped at his heels too often and too closely that night; he was supremely contemptuous of their fire-cracker powder and their pot-metal guns. He wanted to get to Guariqui and have something to eat, and then sleep for twenty good hours. And the racing of the car made him dizzy. And every bone in his body ached. And he wondered how long he would have to keep shooting.
Then he sat back, with a sigh, and rested his arms. He noticed that his gun-barrel was hot to the touch. He noticed, too, that the noise of the shooting was not so disquietingly loud in his ears. It began to dawn on his dazed mind that they had faced the worst of the fight. He began to understand that they had forced their way through De Brigard's lines, that they were swinging up to the outskirts of the capital, that they were to reach Guariqui, after all.
Then he remembered pounding out over a narrow iron bridge, under which flashed and rippled a little stream as blue as a robin's egg. It made him think, for a moment, how thirsty he was, how much he would give for a hatful of that rippling blue water. Then all thought of the stream passed from his indifferent mind, for before him he could see walls, white walls and blue walls and pink walls, and above them huddled red roofs, and the dark green of tree-tops, and a yellow cathedral-tower, and still farther away a coppered roof-dome glimmering like a ball of fire in the slanting sunlight. Then he heard a bugle call, and call again, sweet as silver, like a voice out of a dream.
That mellow and trailing note was punctuated by the sudden blow-like sounds of rifle-shots, from somewhere amid the soft white and blue and pink of the very walls ahead of him. He saw the track-ballast about him leap and erupt into ominous little clouds of flying dust. Ulloa's outposts were shooting at him, from Guariqui. They were under fire, from their own people.
"Quick!" he called to the girl. "Show a flag!"
"How?" she asked, not understanding.
"Tie it to a carbine-end! Quick!"
"Tie what?" she called in his ear.
"A flag—a white flag—anything white!"
He knew, the next moment, that she was tearing a linen underskirt from her own limbs. He could see her quick fingers rip it into an oblong of fluttering white. He stooped for the carbine that lay in the car-bottom, and as he stooped he heard the girl call to him.
It was a call of something more than alarm. It was terror, unthinking and abject terror.
He was back at her side in a second: his first sickening thought was that a bullet had reached her.
But he saw only her outstretched hand, pointing foolishly and vaguely to something in front of her. He saw her wide and staring eyes, as she crouched down and back, lower and lower in the driving-seat, as though preparing herself for some vast and overwhelming blow.
He whipped about and followed the line of that terrified stare. Then he understood what it meant. He saw where the two lines of the narrow-gauge track came to an end; he saw where some half-dozen lengths of rails had been torn away, and tossed to one side. He saw the track, on which they rode, the track which he had come to regard as something fixed and stable, as something permanent as the earth itself, end in nothing.
His foot went down on the emergency brake, viciously, at the same moment that his outflung arm threw the speed lever off. He knew, even then, that it was all useless, that it was all too late. But he acted subconsciously, automatically. He knew what was coming, even before the wheel-flanges dropped from the rail-end and lunged and shook and pounded along the sleepers. He braced himself and held tight, as the girl was doing—praying, all the while, that the rushing thing of steel would not overturn.
But a forward wheel gave way, under the strain, and the car-floor suddenly dipped under them, dipped and bowed until the axle locked against a cross-tie with a jolt that sent the great hulk careening sideways, where it raised and rolled over in the yellow sand, ponderously, indignantly, like an ill-treated animal.
McKinnon caught the girl as she fell on him, with a sharp out-swinging motion. But he swung and tumbled her free of the car, away from the menace of the toppling cartridge-boxes. Then he rolled over on his face, and crawled to the girl's side, on all fours, with the grit of yellow sand between his teeth and the choking smart of the dust-cloud still in his gasping lungs.